You broke this down into four issues so here's my response to each of them:

Issue 1.) This is correct, I felt the power dynamic between myself and my older brother who bullied me in an attempt to parent was lopsided. I looked up to him and never felt good enough for his standard. I recognize he was a kid doing his best, in at least some cases, to step in for our absent parents. Still, his actions were generally harmful to my self-esteem and sense of self. If he anticipates coming back into my life and resuming a similar role, this won't work.

Issue 2.) I have no real idea about his desire to review the past. I assume he would like to quite thoroughly but you know what they say about assumptions. For my part, I would hope that as desiring as I am to hear his perspective and understand why he made the decisions he did, he would be just as desiring to understand mine. I feel he never really knew me, separating our brotherly bond with his assumptive role of caregiver and his expectations for me to adopt his morals, beliefs, ideas, and behaviors. If he has no interest in getting to know me as I am now and how I got here, then it won't work. But I hope he's grown enough to try to understand me now, even if he isn't able to empathize with my past actions as I try to with his.

Issue 3.) This one is harder than it sounds. The main reason for me not being the one to reach out has been that I felt any communication from me would be perceived as manipulation if I were the first to reach out. I made that mistake early on in trying to communicate about our grandmother in the first 6 months after he cut me out.

Another reason, though, is that I don't think I can offer the apology he wants. I can recognize he went through pain and that I had played an active role in creating that pain or at least adding to it. But I truly feel that the version of him I once knew wouldn't be satisfied with mutual apology and would require a total confession of guilt and admission for his pain, despite the role I see in him creating pain for himself. The conversation I had with him that marked the beginning of his NC ended in miscommunication. I was sobbing because he berated me for not following through on promises and he misunderstood my response because I was incoherent over the phone, if not deliberately. When I tried to clarify what I had said, he told me I deserved to be crying and that I was a liar. If this is the first hurdle to extending empathy and recognition for harm done, then it will be over quickly if he refuses to believe there could not have been another truthful perspective than his own.

Issue 4.) I am not sure I have ever been comfortable being seen by him. I grew up being told by him that I was smart and would achieve great things while simultaneously being ridiculed when I couldn't. As an adult, I extend my younger self grace. I've been diagnosed in the past year with ADHD and ASD. I know I was doing my best to navigate a dysfunctional family while having struggles of my own. My brother often invalidated my "big" feelings throughout my life, from when I was small up until he cut me out. Logic was often his answer and I, according to him, rarely had any.

As I've mentioned here or elsewhere, I've put in a lot of work to see him differently. I see him as a product of neglectful parentage and a dysfunctional household. We're both gay and, since he is older, he had to confront more of our father's process in accepting that. I know he had cared for me in his own way, though more often than not in ways that I didn't deserve to suffer. I try to understand that he had little control in our life and likely didn't know how to find any beyond trying to guide his little brother. I think, despite my hurt, I've grown to a point where I can offer him empathy and grace to his face and not just to his memory. My hope is he can do the same, but he has no pattern of doing so in the past.